The Sixteen Burdens

by David Khalaf

  And once he had the suit, then what? He didn’t know how gumshoes went about finding work. Everything he learned about them was from the comics or Black Mask. All that mattered to Gray was that they worked alone, and answered to no one, and did whatever they damn well pleased.

  Lost in thought, Gray didn’t hear the clip-clop of heels before it was too late. He turned and saw a slender woman in a crisp white blouse and blue skirt bearing down on him from the restaurant. Gray stuffed his fistful of maps into the breast pocket of his jacket as she trotted toward him in shiny black heels.

  “What are you doing out here, young man?”

  Her makeup was thick, like a chunky oil painting. She’d be an attractive blonde if her big teeth didn’t fight her face for so much attention. Her name tag identified her as Helen, the host. Helen the horse.

  “I’m out for a stroll, doll,” Gray said. “Enjoying the fresh air.”

  Gray inhaled deeply and coughed out a lungful of car fumes.

  Helen the horse whinnied in consternation and pointed at the bulge in his jacket pocket.

  “You can’t be out here selling those maps.”

  “With all due respect, lady, you ain’t owner of the sidewalk.”

  She crossed her arms.

  “Do you know who Mary Pickford is?”

  Gray scratched his forehead in mock contemplation. Of course he knew who Mary Pickford was. The old broad drove by the Derby every day in the back of her 1936 Buick Limited, the kind with a hood so long Jimmy Stewart could lie on it without his feet dangling over the front.

  She was hard to miss, too, in that black veil she always wore, thick and impenetrable like the haze that settled in the basin during the dead heat of summer. Her veil was always black, her dress and gloves too, like some kind of graveyard ghoul. A one-woman funeral procession.

  “Yeah, I heard of her. The old broad who fell on hard times, and landed mostly on her face.”

  “Shh!” Helen said, as if the German SS were eavesdropping on them.

  Gray unfolded one of his maps. It was an accurate hand-drawn representation of Los Angeles, with tiny three-dimensional renderings of stars’ mansions popping out of the hills. They were simple but faithful portrayals of the actual homes, right down to the stately columns on Bing Crosby’s colonial-style mansion in Toluca Lake. There was a wide border around the square map that featured portraits of the celebrities. Gray pointed to Pickford’s beatific face.

  “There. They called her America’s Sweetheart. That was before she became Frankenstein’s bride.”

  Helen folded her arms.

  “Well, she is not so sweet when her privacy has been invaded. Mrs. Pickford got a hold of your map and called to ask why an establishment as prestigious as ours was allowing a hooligan outside to give detailed instructions to her private home.”

  “I think she’d be honored to be included among the world’s great talents.”

  “She is not honored to be in some two-bit publication that is profiting off her celebrity. Nor are any of our other esteemed guests. Why, just last week Barbara Stanwyck had a Peeping Tom outside her kitchen window.”

  “So?”

  “So, he had a copy of your map in his pocket,” Helen said. “What would you say to Mrs. Stanwyck?”

  “I’d tell her to buy drapes.”

  “You’re a rude young man,” she said. “You only care about yourself.”

  “Someone’s got to,” Gray said. “Self-preservation’s the first law of nature. It’s why I sell these cruddy maps, and why you paint your face like a clown to distract fellas from your beaver teeth.”

  Helen’s lips curled over her teeth in a sneer. She swiped at his map but Gray yanked it away and stuffed it in his outer pocket.

  “Give me those maps!”

  She grabbed the sleeve of Gray’s jacket.

  “You don’t wanna touch me, lady.”

  “I’m confiscating your maps for the police. Give them to me or I’ll have you arrested, you…you guttersnipe.”

  Gray had been called a tramp and a ragamuffin. This was the first time he had been upgraded to guttersnipe.

  “Now wait just a minute—”

  Helen yanked on the arm of his jacket; it ripped at the seam and the entire sleeve came off in her hand. Gray made a break for it, but Helen sank her fingernails into his forearm. The harder he yanked, the deeper she dug those finger fangs into his skin.

  She snatched the stack of maps from his inside pocket and let go of him. Then, seven or eight at a time, she ripped the maps to bits. Pieces fluttered along the sidewalk like a ticker-tape parade of spite.

  Only after Helen had destroyed the maps did she notice the blood on her fingernails where she had dug into Gray’s arm. The blood was wet, and shiny, and black as oil. Where sunlight hit, it sparkled with golden highlights.

  “I told you not to touch me,” he said.

  Helen looked over at the deep, crescent-shaped cuts she had made on Gray’s forearm. She recoiled. It wasn’t the color that seemed to disturb her so much. It was the fact that Gray’s blood was dripping upward.

  CHAPTER

  T WO

  GRAY COVERED HIS bare arm and ran north up the street. He ducked into an alcove and blotted his cuts with his ripped sleeve until the bleeding had stopped.

  Vine Street shot north toward landscaped hills bejeweled with fancy homes, the kind built by people who enjoyed looking down at the city below. The Hollywood Hills served as a dividing line, a breakwater that stopped the rushing tide of brown buildings and gray streets from washing northward into the green orchards and fields in the valley beyond.

  The intersection was blanketed in straight electrical wires, like a web made by an orderly if unimaginative spider. An eastbound streetcar approached; it had a Christmas wreath on the front and a strip of garland along the side. All of it was wilting in the midst of the winter heat wave. That, and a few lousy tinsel trees hanging from the street lamps were the only things that suggested the upcoming holiday season.

  When the trolley stopped for traffic at the intersection, Gray ran into the street and hopped on the back. He crouched sideways onto the narrow step and held on by the slender handle on the outside of the emergency exit door.

  The trolley ambled down the boulevard, offering glimpses of the Hollywoodland sign in the hills beyond. At Hollywood and Gower there was a giant advertisement painted on the side of a six-story building for an upcoming film called Gone With the Wind. A man and woman embraced amid a burning city, getting their priorities all wrong as they stopped to kiss in the inferno.

  “Not just the greatest love story of 1939!” the sign read. “The greatest love story of all time!”

  Sounds like the greatest hooey of all time.

  Gray rode the red car as it turned south into Downtown. He jumped off at Broadway and Seventh, just up the street from the United Artists movie theater. Gray often snuck in to see re-issues of old films such as Robin Hood and The Thief of Baghdad starring Douglas Fairbanks, the actor everyone still called America’s Hero. Even though these old films were being remade with sound, none of the talking stars were ever as beguiling as Fairbanks in his silent swashbuckling adventures.

  He walked east another fifteen minutes, finally reaching the Emory Partridge Home for Boys. The building was located under the shadow of the Sixth Street Bridge, on an industrial cul-de-sac that overlooked a long muddy ditch someone thought to call the Los Angeles River.

  The building was a cavernous, one-story building in an architectural style Farrell liked to call vintage teardown. It used to be an ice house before the spread of electric ice boxes drove it out of business. Its brick walls had developed a sooty black patina from the tire factory upstream, and the windows were almost too grimy to be of any practical use.

  Gray walked around to the side, into the large printing room where everyone worked. Light streamed in through a wall of filthy windows, casting a brown hue over the room. The outside world was Technicolor, but they had b
een left behind in a sepia-colored film.

  Boys were at their work stations, feeding the printing press or folding an endless stack of maps. There were never more than two dozen boys at any given time, but Gray didn’t bother to remember their names anymore. They all looked the same to him: waifish pale things limping down the halls on polio-stricken limbs—a haunted house of the lame.

  A boy in crutches and another with a lazy eye were by the paper cutter when they spotted Gray and the dried blood on his arm. Immediately they parted the way for him.

  “Typhoid Mary coming through,” Crutches said.

  “Watch it,” Lazy Eye said. “You’re gonna get us all sick.”

  Gray looked at the boy’s twisted legs and bent spine.

  “You don’t need my help for that.”

  On his first day, every new boy learned to fold a map, make his bed, and keep as far away from Gray as possible. Even crippled kids operated on a hierarchy, and no one wanted to be caught fraternizing with the contagious one.

  Gray swept by the work station of some new kid in a wheelchair and grabbed his scissors.

  “Hey!” he said, practically jumping out of his wheelchair. “Those are mine!”

  “Don’t blow your wig. I’ll be right back.”

  Gray went into the communal bathrooms and surveyed his arm, which had stopped bleeding. He’d have to change into his long-sleeve shirt; if Farrell saw his wounds he’d cast a kitten.

  His attention turned to the few slender whiskers on his chin; they seemed to sprout overnight, like mushrooms. Using the scissors, he snipped the whiskers as close to the skin as he could manage without cutting himself.

  He hadn’t given it much thought until lately, the way his round face had become more angular in the past year or so, how his pants now ended two inches short of his ankles. But he began to notice that fewer women stopped on the street to ruffle his mop of dirty blond hair, that cops started to grab him more roughly when he loitered anywhere too long. This was a home for boys, and he was hardly a boy anymore.

  “You get in a fight?”

  Gray turned and saw the new kid in the doorway, eyeing his arm from his wheelchair. He was older than the others, probably about Gray’s age, but that was where the similarities ended. The fella was short and round and dark featured, like someone had dropped a talking coconut onto a wheelchair.

  “What’s it to you?” Gray asked.

  The boy wheeled himself in and eyed the wounds sourly, as if it were some kind of personal affront to him.

  “I’m supposed to keep you out of trouble,” he said.

  “Haven’t you heard?” Gray said. “I am the trouble.”

  The kid puffed his chest out a little. The air around him seemed to expand. Gray rubbed his eyes and wondered if he’d been out in the sun too long.

  “My name is José Doroteo Arango Alameda.”

  “Big name for a short stack.”

  “You can call me Panchito.”

  “How’s about I call you a taxi instead?”

  Gray grabbed the handles of the wheelchair and spun the boy around.

  “I’m your new bunkmate!”

  Gray groaned. He hadn’t had a bunkmate in years. He used the bed above him as a library of books and magazines. It was his escape when he didn’t want to work, or when Farrell was in one of his snits.

  “The bottom bunk’s mine,” Gray said. “Good luck climbing up.”

  Gray grabbed the handles of his wheelchair and pushed Panchito out the door.

  “Hey!”

  “Abyssinia, fella.”

  After removing the tissue and making sure the bleeding had stopped, Gray went to the dormitory to see if it was true. The rest of the boys were in the printing room, so it was quiet inside the large space filled with rows of bunk beds. The windows let in more of the brown, hazy light and offered a view of the putrid trickle of river below. The boys had to keep the windows closed at all times to keep out the flies and smells of rotten garbage.

  Sure enough, Gray’s makeshift library was all heaped carelessly in a pile by his lower bed. There were copies of Boys’ Life and Black Mask, a dog-eared copy of The Big Sleep, and the ‘R,’ ‘S,’ and ‘T’ volumes of a water-damaged Encyclopedia Britannica Gray had found in a garbage bin.

  “Oh, there you are.”

  Farrell Partridge appeared from the other side of the bed, holding a feather duster in one hand and, in the other, a highball glass half full of vodka with a splash of tomato juice. He was wearing a silk kimono that came to just below his knees, and his legs stuck out like the limbs of a hairy tarantula.

  “You got no right to touch my things,” Gray said.

  “Your things?”

  Farrell sucked on his Bloody Mary, like a baby with his bottle. He went through more Worcestershire sauce than the cook could keep stocked. Gray couldn’t remember the last time the man’s right hand was empty.

  Using the tip of his index finger, Farrell wiped a drip from the side of his pasty, hairless face.

  “Where were these reading materials?” Farrell asked.

  “On my bed.”

  Farrell carefully dusted the edge of the bed, as if it were a Grecian urn in a museum.

  “Your bed? Do you own it?”

  Farrell was playing one of his games now. Gray knew the rules: The less talking, the better. Remorse must be absolute. There was no winning the game, only varying degrees of loss.

  Gray bowed his head and shook it.

  “No, you don’t own it,” Farrell said. “It’s my bed, which I allow you to use. And that means everything on it is mine.”

  Technically it was the property of his father, Emory Partridge, who had founded the home with money from his wooden-toy empire. But old Mr. Partridge was chronically ill and hadn’t tended to the home in years.

  From among the pile, Farrell picked up Gray’s copy of The Big Sleep; the man had a talent for identifying objects precious to people.

  “You like mysteries?” Farrell asked. “Here’s one for you to consider: Where has a certain young man been all afternoon instead of doing his chores?”

  “Selling the last of my maps.”

  Farrell opened the book up to the first page and pinched it, a hostage in the crossfire of negotiations.

  “Oh? Then where’s my money?”

  Gray bit his lip.

  “I didn’t make quota.”

  “Again?”

  Farrell ripped the first page out of the book and crumpled it into a ball. And just like that, the opening image of detective Philip Marlowe ceased to exist.

  “Then where are the remaining maps?”

  “Some frail stole ’em. She ripped them up.”

  “You let someone steal your maps?”

  Farrell took the next page and ripped it out. He did it easily and without remorse, a boy ripping the wings off a fly.

  Detective Marlowe’s meeting with General Sternwood. Gone.

  “Such a shame,” Farrell said. “That money will have to come out of your pay, for however long it takes.”

  Gray didn’t bother to calculate how many months it would take him to pay off those maps. It would be like trying to count cigarette butts in the gutter outside the Cotton Club.

  Farrell cast a pointed glance at Gray’s arm.

  “Did you get into a fight again?”

  Gray had forgotten about the scratches on his arm. He covered them gingerly.

  “That woman, she grabbed me.”

  “Did you bleed? Did anyone see?”

  “No, I swear!”

  Farrell ripped another page out of the book.

  Marlowe’s fight with Vivian Sternwood. Gone.

  “Nobody can know. They’ll take you away. They’ll lock you up and prod at you with needles and knives.”

  “No different than this dump.”

  The words came out before he could stop them. Farrell went very pale. He grabbed The Big Sleep between his two bony hands and, with some effort, ripped it in half. Then he w
alked to the windows, opened one up, and threw the two halves out, letting them tumble down the muddy riverbank.

  Philip Marlowe. Gone.

  “After all I do for you,” Farrell said. “After all my sacrifice.”

  His face drooped into a big pouty frown, the kind a forty-year-old man should have stopped making thirty-five years ago.

  From the side pocket in his kimono, Farrell removed a pair of medical gloves and the brass contraption that never failed to make Gray tense. It hinged in half like a pocketknife, and with his thumbnail Farrell pulled out the sharp, flat piece of metal that drew the blood.

  After slipping on the gloves, he grabbed Gray’s wrist and walked his fingers up Gray’s forearm, which was crisscrossed with tiny white scars. He searched for an un-punctured patch of skin and jammed the blade through the soft flesh. Gray winced.

  “You’d be dead but for me,” Farrell said. “This poisoned blood of yours.”

  He removed a small brass bowl from his pocket and held it upside down, then squeezed Gray’s forearm. Blood dripped upward into the bowl. In the dimness, it was black and thick as oil. Then a beam of light would hit it and cast off glints of gold.

  “What if you died? Just think about how much a funeral would cost me.”

  “It would be an excuse to buy new duds.”

  Farrell twisted Gray’s pinky finger.

  “You are forever indebted to me. You were abandoned by your mother. My father took you in.”

  This was always Farrell’s trump card. It won every argument.

  “She left you on the doorstep in the freezing cold—”

  Gray always doubted that it had actually been freezing.

  “—wrapped in nothing but a cheap shawl—”

  A shawl that Farrell had kept for himself.

  “She rang the doorbell and then sped away down the dirt road—”

  “In a beat-up gray Studebaker, I know.”

  “She didn’t even care enough to name you.”